The best U.S. modern architecture of the past dozen years—that is the material of a book on sale last week at Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art. Built in U.S.A.—1932-1944 ($3) reviews handsomely in pictures and text 47 structures from homes to bridges, and suggests good news for people who have been afraid that modern architecture was always going to look like so many perforated white shoeboxes.
Most U.S. modernists still revere and follow in basic principles the European pioneers of the early ’20s—Gropius, Oud, Le Corbusier, Miës van der Rohe. But younger architects no longer make a fetish of pure functionalism (following Le Corbusier’s dictum “a house is a machine for living”) and the ruthless exclusion of all ornament. While they pay close attention to the purposes of their buildings and are inclined to let structural forms speak for themselves, they are concerned about the grace of their designs. All this can be clearly seen in three of the book’s examples:
¶ New York City’s Municipal Asphalt Plant (see cut), exterior designed by Manhattan’s Ely Jacques Kahn and Robert Allan Jacobs, once inspired the city’s terrible-tempered Park Commissioner Robert Moses to remark: “Horrible modernistic stuff . . . what could be worse?” But it is doubtful whether many New Yorkers will long feel that way about a building whose flowing, oval contours harmonize so well with the serpentine East River Drive on which it stands.
¶ The house of L. D. Owens in Sausalito, Calif, (see cut), designed by San Francisco’s Gardner A. Dailey, is a fine example of the flourishing California school of modernists. A modest wooden structure, it is planned “like a wide-angle camera” to take utmost advantage of the frequently befogged Sausalito daylight, has clear glass over half its front and rear elevations.
¶ The Lake County Tuberculosis Sanatorium of Waukegan, Ill. (see cut), designed by Chicago’s William A. Ganster and William L. Pereira, is a serene, streamlined, shiplike structure of reinforced concrete, with broad sunlit decks where beds are rolled from the patients’ glass-walled rooms.
If Built in U.S.A. is an argument for the clean beauty and intelligence of modern architecture, it also makes obvious how much a luxury good modernism remains. Many of the buildings in the book are obviously pleasure domes of great expense. All of the buildings imply the services of a modern architect, beyond the reach of ordinary pocketbooks except in the case of a few new low-cost housing developments. Modern architecture for the general public still waits for public taste to demand it from reactionary building contractors and building-trade unions.
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